I did a really good job of cleaning up the pantry during the run-up to Christmas, and then promptly trashed it while preparing the Tapastravaganza. And then I just kind of let it go, because I was so tired after the holidays, and things slowly got more chaotic, and now I’m having trouble finding stuff in there, which is where I was before I cleaned it up last time. So that’s on my list, and given that I spent last night deep-cleaning and reorganising the kitchen, I sort of feel like I should let the momentum carry me into the pantry and get that all straightened up again. I’d like to paint and really properly sort out the storage space in both rooms, but right now, I’m sort of in the looking-at-paint-chips-and-research phase, and absent some magical free intervention by a proper joiner and decorator, who would have to know more than I do about what I actually want, besides effortless perfection, I have a lot ahead of me.

In the meantime, as a very small start down the road to merely tidier, I took a bag of ageing dried Turkish figs, and made some quick jam. Figs are one of my favourite fruits, and as I have some as-yet-unzested-and-juiced Seville oranges knocking about, as well as a bit of juice that was just sitting in the fridge, I thought I might as well combine two of the fruits I’m keenest on into another well-loved food: homemade jam.

I only had fifteen good-sized figs in my little bag, meaning I’d get about one jar of jam out of them, so there’s really no point in processing that for long-term storage, because once I’ve got a jar of fig jam in the fridge, it’s not going to last long enough to go bad. I’ve only ever made fig jam from fresh before, but I knew it was perfectly possible to make it from dried fruit, and a quick consultation with Chef Google brought me to The Kitchn’s Mission Fig Quick Jam recipe, which I adapted to make mine.

Bung all the ingredients, except for the vanilla, in a small saucepan, mix them up, and bring contents to boil. Allow to boil for about one minute, then drop it back to a simmer, stirring occasionally, until figs soften up a bit, and juice and sugar gets syrupy, about ten minutes. You don’t have to hover directly over it and stir constantly, but don’t venture far away, and keep half an eye on it; depending on the size of your pan, sugar can boil over really fast. Remove pan from heat, stir in the vanilla, and allow to cool for another ten minutes or so. It doesn’t have to be stone cold, but it should be cool enough that any accidental splatters won’t cause injury.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

Transfer pan contents to a food processor, and whizz until you have jam. You may think there’s too much liquid, but you will be wrong. I was prepared to put it all back in the pan and cook it down further, but that turned out to not be at all necessary. That pectin-rich orange has your back. Place jam in clean jar, seal and store in the refrigerator. It should be completely fine for a week or two, minimum.

Tastes like sunny skies and endless summer.

This jam is delicious. I knew, instinctively, that swopping the water for orange juice and adding zest would be a good idea, but it was even better than I expected. I will be baking a loaf of bread, and getting some good goat’s cheese to eat with this, as t’s very sweet, and cries out for something a bit salty and savoury to balance it and show it to its fullest advantage, assuming I don’t just shovel it directly into my mouth with a spoon. This is definitely going on the list of recipes to repeat.

The first that comes to mind is that you can’t go into a major supermarket without finding buckets of cheap daffodils, bringing a promise that spring will eventually arrive, for sale. I know these are, like, floral battery hens, but I cannot resist them. (Battery hen eggs, those I can resist. Gladly.) January is a hard month, without much to look forward to in the shops and markets, but those daffodils always buck me up a lot.

Still life, with Seville oranges and daffodils

Not, however, quite as much as their companions in that photo: Seville oranges! I love them so much. I’ve made marmalade before, but mostly, I buy as many of them as I can find and carry home, to zest and juice and stash in the freezer. It can be painful work, when your hands are as beat up as mine often are, but as long as I remember to put on a pair of latex gloves first, it’s not too bad, assuming I don’t bark my knuckles on the grater. I mix the zest with a bit of water, and freeze it, and the juice, in ice cube trays. (Separately, that is.) Once frozen solid, I pop the individual cubes into plastic bags, and then they’re easy to use, as one ice cube usually contains enough zest to flavour whatever it is I’m making. And, oh, that flavour, and that fragrance! There’s really nothing else like it, although you can fake it reasonably well with a mixture of unwaxed regular orange and lime zest. Not the same, but it’ll do in the months after I’ve run through my supply of bitter orange.

But before the zesting and juicing (and I am hoping to find another batch in the next day or two, before they vanish as suddenly as they appeared), I celebrated with one of my favourite cakes:

Bitter orange and polenta cake

As a born midwesterner, cornmeal, better known over here by its Italian name of polenta, is something I grew up on. Cornbread and corn muffins were one of the few things my mother ever baked, although hers came from a box mix, and I say that without contempt: on the few occasions I’ve found Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix over here, I’ve cheerfully paid whatever extortionate price they wanted for it, because that stuff doesn’t even need nostalgia to make it taste good. A staple where I grew up, made, as it is, in Chelsea, MI. But, given that I don’t have ready access to the tasty cheat’s version, I have learned to bake cornbread from scratch. If I add blueberries to it, my father-in-law loves it, and Phil’s not really crazy about it in general, but he does love this cake, possibly because of the heady scent and flavour of the oranges, but most likely because I serve it with good Devon cream.

Most recipes for this cake contain a fair amount of ground almonds, but as anything made with ground almonds is far too reminiscent of marzipan, and both Phil and I utterly detest that shit, I had to do some fiddling and adaptation of a few recipes to come up with my own.

Bitter orange and polenta cake

For the cake:

250 grams of sweet butter, i.e., unsalted

250 grams golden caster sugar (I do have a preference for unrefined sugars, not because I delude myself into thinking they’re in any way nutritionally superior, but because I think they taste better. You can use white caster, though, if you prefer.)

4 eggs

Zest of three Seville oranges (sub 2 large sweet oranges, and one lime, if no Seville oranges available.) Juice the oranges, and set aside 125ml for the glaze.

175 grams polenta. I used the regular stuff, not quick-cook, but I would be surprised if it made any difference; it’s just what I had in stock.

175 grams unbleached plain white flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp orange flower water. Rosewater is dandy, too, or vanilla extract, if you like; I just wanted an overwhelmingly fragrant orange cake! All three are optional.

1-2 tablespoons slivered pistachios

For the syrup:

125 ml Seville orange juice

125 grams golden caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 170ºC, and grease and line a round cake pan. Mine was 22cm.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one by one, then add in the dry ingredients, plus the orange flower water, and the orange juice left, after you’ve saved 125ml for the glaze. (3 Sevilles really should give you enough for both the glaze, and a small amount for the cake, but if yours are small, or mean with their juices, juice another one.) Mix until your batter is incorporated, and then spoon into the cake pan, and smooth the top. This is a thick batter, as this is a fairly dense cake, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Begin testing for doneness at about 35-40 minutes. Mine took just over 50 minutes to be done, but everybody’s oven is different. You probably know the drill: when a tester/toothpick/skewer comes out of the centre clean, it’s done. Remove from oven, give it a couple of minutes, and then turn out onto a rack to cool.

Once the cake is cool, put the remaining orange juice and caster sugar into a small pan, and bring to the boil on the hob, then allow to simmer until reduced down to a nice syrupy consistency. Figure 5-10 minutes. Once done, allow to cool, and then pour over the cool cake, and sprinkle with pistachio slivers. Serve with single cream or Greek yogurt, as you please.

This cake keeps pretty well in the fridge; I’m on Day 4 of mine, with a couple of slices left, and it’s still doing fine, although that’s going to be one slice left, after I hit publish on this.

It’s Wednesday, which means, in the normal course of things, Phil will be home tomorrow evening, and I will be feeding two (and, on Friday and Sunday, three) people, for dinner. I am not a big eater of breakfast and lunch; I’m much more prone to snacking lightly early in the day, and then eating my main meal at dinner, but Phil likes his three squares, and while I tend to cook the main dish of the evening meal on the day itself, I like to have my sides, and Phil’s lunches, already made up, so all I have to do is reheat and put it in front of him. So Wednesdays are devoted, in large part, to shopping and cooking.

Breakfasts are easy; I make up a big vat of pinhead oatmeal, which I stash in a large yogurt or peanut butter bucket in the fridge, and then reheat in the mornings. Given that it takes forever to make the steel-cut stuff, I toss two cups of it in a large saucepan, add about 4 cups of water, and cook it until the water is mostly absorbed. Then I take it off the heat, put a lid on it, and let it sit overnight on the cold hob, and refrigerate first thing in the morning. It’s a matter of scooping some out into a bowl, adding water and a splash of milk, and giving it a few minutes in the microwave after that. My attitude to steel-cut oats is much the same as how I feel about bone stock; I think it’s objectively better tasting, probably better for you, but there’s nothing particularly magical or virtuous about it. If pressed for time, or out of stock, I’ll happily use rolled oats (or liquid stock concentrate, for that matter) and think it’s close enough to ideal to not be bothered by it. I’ve only been able to find the barely-processed stuff in one health food store, and I do sometimes use it up before I get a chance to replenish.

Instant, or what they call “porridge oats,” over here, however, is completely out of the question. It’s like paste, it is horrible, and I am pretty sure most of the benefits of eating whole grains are lost in the hideous slurry you get when you cook it up. Avoid!

So, before I go out vegetable shopping, I’m cooking up some lentils, because the vast majority of cook-ahead stuff I stash in the fridge for the weekend are curries, and I always like to have a dal as one of them. First off, I LOVE the stuff. Let’s just get that out of the way straight off; there is a fair amount of self-interest there. Secondly, Phil loves it too, and research seems to indicate pulses are some of the best carbs you can eat, if you’re looking to control blood sugar, which we are. (Much the same with oatmeal.) Carbs are not the devil around here, in spite of the currently well-controlled diabetic I am feeding, but for the most part, we like them to be extremely complex carbs, full of character; i.e., I am not baking cookies and making trifle very often. I am cautiously adding a bit of wholegrain bread back into the carb budget, because I have this awesome new oven, and I love baking bread. (And also eating it, of course.)

Today’s dal is going to be pretty basic, as I’m still not back into the swing of my usual routine, and I am going with what has consistently worked well. Thus:

Ana’s Basic Tadka-ish Dal:

Step 1:

300-ish grams of split red lentils

2 dried chili peppers

2 fat cloves of garlic

1 teaspoon turmeric

Pick over, and then rinse the lentils thoroughly. Put in a good-sized saucepan, and cover with water. Add chilis, garlic, and turmeric, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, turn the flame (I have a gas hob) down to low, and partially cover. Cook until lentils have basically dissolved into a grainy-looking mush. Remove from burner and allow to cool for 10-15 minutes, then fish out the chilis and discard. I generally purée the lentils and garlic cloves with a stick blender, because I like a smooth dal, but it isn’t strictly necessary if you like it somewhat more rustic. Just give the lentils and garlic cloves, which will be plenty soft, a good mashing, in that case.

Step 2, the tadka:

Ghee, or other fat with a high smoke point

A pinch of hing (also known as asafoetida)

About a tablespoon of whole spices, I generally favour black mustard, cumin, and nigella seeds, or if I’m feeling really lazy, just some pre-mixed panch phoron.

1 large onion, finely sliced into half-moons.

3-5 thin green chilis, slit along one side

3-5 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced, depending on how big they are

1 dried chili pepper

1 tablespoon ground coriander

2 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground fenugreek

small handful of dried curry leaves, crushed

juice of 1/2 lemon

a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh coriander

Heat the ghee or other fat in a heavy-bottomed pan on a medium flame. When it’s good and hot, throw in the seeds and the dried chili. When they begin to pop, put in the hing, and give it all a good stir. Add the onions, and cook for a few minutes, until they begin to soften. Now is the time to add the garlic, green chilis, and all of the spices, except for the curry leaves. If it starts to stick, add a small amount of water, and keep stirring. Once the onions have gone limp and brown, and the chilis and garlic have softened, put in the curry leaves and let them crumble down a bit more, and get slicked with the ghee and spices.

Dump it all into the lentils, and stir it all up! If you’re planning on eating it soon, put the lentils back over a moderate flame, and heat it all up. Add water, if it’s gone thicker than you’d like, and before serving, add the lemon juice and sprinkle with the fresh coriander. It usually goes straight into a container and into the fridge for me, at this point, and by leaving the whole chilis in it it gets quite a bit spicier as it rests until we’re ready to eat it. Given that this makes quite a lot of dal, I usually get a few portions out of it for both of us, depending on what it’s being served with. I just pull it out and reheat by the serving, adding water as needed, because it thickens quite a lot upon standing.

And now I’m off, to get some labneh straining, and soak some black-eyed beans! Wednesday is well underway.

I’ve mostly gone through a shift in thinking about how I feed myself when I’m home alone. I used to rarely put much effort into it; lots of microwaved veggies, uninspired bags of salad, yogurt, etc. And, alas, too much junk food, because hey, eating mostly steamed cabbage, near-naked salads, and low fat Greek yogurt leaves you lots of extra calories in the budget, so why not fill it up with M&Ms?

Phil found the journal entry about my part-time singleton eating kind of bleak and depressing, although I didn’t actually intend it to be a downer. I thought it was kind of amusing, but then I started thinking about it, and concluded, at the risk of sounding like kind of an asshole, that I deserve my best efforts, too. I don’t always do it, of course, but sometimes I do, and then I make stuff like this:

Epic salad was epic.

It’s a grainy, iPad photo of my dinner salad, and it was epic. I roasted a bunch of stuff this morning, and found half an avocado in the fridge, along with a bag of mâche, and some other saladings, and this salad was born.

1/2 small butternut squash

1 yellow bell pepper

1/2 small avocado

25g mâche, also known as Lamb’s Lettuce

1/2 small red onion

red wine vinegar

1 small cucumber (I much prefer the small Lebanese cucumbers I get from the various middle-eastern greengrocers where I like to do my veg and fruit shopping, but a peeled English cucumber would be fine, if not ideal.)

a few radishes, sliced into matchsticks

za’atar

vinaigrette (or whichever sort of salad dressing you like, this would be fine with good olive oil and a squeeze of lemon, which is about 1/3 of the way to my basic vinaigrette)

Heat oven to 200º C or 400º F.

Peel and cube squash, and toss with a small amount of olive oil. Seed and quarter the bell pepper, and put both of them together on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Roast until everything is nicely browned (took about 15-20 minutes for me.) Remove from oven, and let cool. You can try to peel the bell pepper if you wish, but I just scrubbed off the obviously scorched bits, as the skins on yellow peppers are nowhere near as bitter and tough as those on red peppers, and furthermore, don’t come off particularly easily.

If you’re me, you may now go about your day. The fruits can sit happily enough at room temperature for a few hours and no harm done.

About fifteen minutes before you want to eat, thinly slice up the red onion, place it in a small bowl, and pour over enough red wine vinegar to cover it. (This will take some of the harsh bite out of the raw onions, but not let them go mushy and gross.) Leave it to pickle a bit, while you get on with the rest of the salad.

Now would be a good time to make up your vinaigrette, if you don’t happen to have any on hand. I almost always have a small jar on the go in the refrigerator. I hesitate to give my vinaigrette recipe, since I don’t really measure much, I just slam it all in a jar, and I have quite a heavy hand with the vinegar, as I like my vinaigrette sharp enough to draw blood. Basically, I use extra virgin olive oil, whatever decent mustard I have on hand, either dijon or wholegrain, a small shot of honey, the juice of one lemon, some crushed garlic, and a big slosh of vinegar, usually white or red wine, although I’ve used balsamic, sherry and cider and had them all taste just fine. Barring that, just dress it with some oil and lemon juice, that’s great, too!

Once you’ve got your vinaigrette, slice up the radishes, the cucumber, and dice the avocado, and put them all in a deep bowl with the mâche and the roasted stuff. Drain the onions and chuck them in, too. Splash on some dressing, and then mix it all up. I have personally never found anything that beat my (very well-washed, and possibly already wearing disposable latex gloves!) hands at really doing the job of getting a proper light coating of dressing on everything, and mixing all the different components together, but hey, maybe you’re better at using official salad implements than I am.

Move it all over to a plate, sprinkle with za’atar, and grab a fork. This could easily feed a few people as a starter, but it made a really solid meal for one, namely me. It was insanely delicious, and will be going into rotation, for me at least, since I’m pretty sure Phil would side-eye the squash pretty hard. I suspect this would not be harmed at all by the addition of black olives, shavings of some kind of hard cheese (something made with ewe’s milk would be my choice), maybe some toasted seeds if za’atar isn’t your thing, and I probably should’ve thought about using a couple of slices of leftover jamón iberico before I finished it. Next time, maybe.